


somewhere i have never travelled

by Fatale (femme)



Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, M/M, Morbid, Multi, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 11:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femme/pseuds/Fatale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Elizabeth, strange combinations of love, and all the things we shouldn’t be able to survive, but inexplicably do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Major character death, run-on sentences, poor grammar and too much angst. Past Peter/El and Peter/Neal/El alluded to. Peter/Neal present and future. You have been warned. 
> 
> What is welcome: Pointing out typos, general factual errors, which I may or may not fix & constructive criticism, which does not include, "I don't get it" or "why did you write this?"
> 
> Also! I am not prone to splitting fics up, but I think it'll read better, like more of a passage of time split into two parts. Yes, the other part is 99% written and I will post it shortly.

somewhere i have never travelled

Title taken from e. e. cummings poem by the same name.

WC: 1630  
Part 1 of 2.  
[The beautiful e. e. cummings poem in full and and some other author's notes here](http://fatale.livejournal.com/235815.html).

 

They’re on the road in a station wagon Peter bought for $750 from a teenager off of Craigslist. It’s a wreck - wood paneled ca. 1989 or so - with tape holding the vinyl seats together, but it’s roomy and the kid took cash, no questions asked. The suitcases Neal flew into New York with and Peter’s backpack he bought from a sports utility store are piled up haphazardly in the back, an incongruous mismatch of elegant luggage and Peter’s miserable need to leave everything familiar behind. Fuzzy pink dice bounce in the window, wrapped around the rearview mirror, and Neal’s mouth thins every time he catches sight of them, but he doesn’t make a move to take them down.

They stop at a gas station outside Pennsylvania, pull up beside tractor trailers taking up four parking spaces at a time. Neal goes inside to buy sodas and chips - maybe a salad, if it’s that kind of gas station - and Peter goes out back to the bathroom marked _Mens_ in uneven stick-on letters.

He pees, careful not to touch anything more than he has to, flushes the toilet with his foot. The soap dispenser’s out and there are long, inexplicable dirt streaks across the tile floor. He washes his hands with the water on as hot as he can stand.

Peter gets back into the car, and Neal slides in a moment later, wordlessly handing Peter a drink. He takes a deep swallow, mouth dry and tongue thick. He hasn’t cried since Elizabeth died, but this is as close as he’s been, with the sun in his eyes and the heat pouring through the windshield.

It would be easy to cry right now.

Afterwards, he can even blame it on the light and Neal probably wouldn’t correct him. But it seems wrong to reduce Elizabeth to the glare of the sun, to pretend his insides aren’t shredded and torn, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Peter feels the sadness moving beneath his skin, restless and impatient, but it’s locked away out of his reach and he wonders how long it’ll take to work its way to the surface, like a terrible splinter. He doesn’t realize he’s spoken out loud until he feels Neal’s hand on his shoulder, and Neal says, “We’ve got fifty states to find out.”

They pull out of the parking lot, flow seamlessly into traffic and Pennsylvania’s just another memory.

 

*

 

They go to the state fair in New Jersey, after it’s gone mostly dark and they’re surrounded by flickering lights that move too fast and make Peter feel dizzy. Neal eats popcorn with too much butter and talks Peter into eating some. The food sits in his mouth, tasting stale and too salty. He forces himself to swallow around the tightness in his throat and it’s a wonder he doesn’t choke on it. Laughter bubbles around him and he eats the food Neal buys for him just because of way he can see the lights reflected back in Neal’s eyes and the unhappy twist to his mouth.

They go back to the hotel room that Neal got for them, keeping in mind Peter’s specifications. No place too fancy, no place El would have loved. That leaves lower-end hotels, which Neal wordlessly books a day before they hit any particular town. The two beds are Neal’s idea, though, and Peter’s not sure what to make of it. They’ve shared a bed on and off for years, every time Neal came home from some jaunt to Europe, tanned and smelling like the ocean. Maybe he thinks Peter doesn’t want to share a bed with him now that the numbers are wrong and it’s just the two of them, not the three of them tucked together, a warm tangle of limbs. Or maybe it’s just too sad for Neal. Neal hasn’t told him and he won’t, and Peter thinks with a little bitterness, how he has never known anything that Neal hasn’t explicitly wanted him to know.

It’s terrible to love someone who doesn’t know how to be loved.

It’s a burden he used to share with Elizabeth, but it feels too heavy on his own, so he shoves it out of his mind and concentrates on breathing instead.

They have double beds now and a carefully orchestrated routine to get ready at night in cramped quarters.

Peter settles back in bed, hears Neal toss and turn, like he does almost every night. It’s not as good as steady breathing on either side of him, Neal’s soft almost-snores pressed into his ear, or the way El sighed softly before dropping off into sleep, but it settles his nerves, unknots something tight in his chest so he can rest.

 

*

 

He got a call from Neal, who said he’d be touching down at JFK at 6 pm and that he’d catch a cab from there. But Peter had other plans - he’d met Neal, helped him with his suitcases and told Neal to get into the car, and yes, the car still ran and no, it wouldn’t explode upon starting.

Peter hesitates to call this a road trip per se, and it's less grand than an odyssey, but it's a chance to see the United States, see all the places and corners that he should have seen with Elizabeth and Neal, the three of them eating cheap food and taking too many pictures. It’s in Kentucky, sitting outside at a picnic table that he takes out a pocketknife and carves her name into the deep grooves of the wood, so he can say that she’s been here, too.

Neal comes back with the barbecue and mustard sauce a deeply upsetting shade of orangey-yellow, and silently looks at Elizabeth’s name for a moment. He takes the knife from Peter and puts his and Peter’s initials beside hers - permanent and scarred into the table.

El had family - parents, a sister - who all loved her deeply, but Neal knew what a foul mouth she had in the mornings, how she cursed and threw things at her alarm clock, how she would tell filthy jokes after three glasses of wine - all these things that she never allowed her family to see. No one loved the real El more than Peter, but he thinks Neal might have been a close second.

 

*

 

It’s Tennessee, I-75 Southbound, when Peter pulls off the side of road and gets sick. He tells himself it was the two McDonald’s hamburgers they ate an hour ago.

He feels himself dry-heave after he’s thrown up all his food, dry racking coughs that make his ribs hurt and his throat burn.

He hears the passenger door open and shut, and Neal walking around the car, gravel crunching under his feet. He doesn’t say anything, just lays a cool hand on the back of Peter’s neck and rubs small circle there.

Peter feels it all, everything he's been avoiding - the ugliness, the pain, the _utter fucking loss_ \- the weight of it pushes him to his knees into the gravel, and he’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to get up again. His coughs turn into sobs that tear from his chest and out his mouth, low and inhuman.

He doesn’t know how long he kneels there as the sun sets and the traffic speeds by, but he feels a hand underneath his arm - Neal, picking him up and helping him into the passenger's seat. Neal buckles him in, kisses his cheek absently like he’s a young child, and takes the wheel.

 

*

 

Neal helps him into the shower, a state down and six hours later. Georgia has good water pressure, Peter thinks absently. Neal tilts his head back, washes the hotel’s 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner out of his hair, then ushers him out of the shower and towel dries him off.

Peter’s exhausted, dazed. He always thought his job would take El, all his dangerous enemies, but in the end, it was a dark night and another car that ran a red light. Just a goddamn, stupid accident. Peter had been at home for once when he got the call. Neal had been - well, who the fuck knows, somewhere in Europe authenticating art - and Peter had been alone.

It was Neal’s fault he was alone, and maybe Peter’s and a little bit El’s. Dependency frightened Neal, made him narrow-eyed and suspicious, which he tried to hide with generic pleasantness. Peter and El let him leave, come back, take his time, lie to them about unimportant things, because they had known that one day Neal would stay and they had all the time in the world.

They had been wrong about all of it.

Neal helps him step into sweatpants and pulls a t-shirt over his head and Peter would laugh at how helpful, how strangely maternal Neal’s being, except it frightens Peter that he’s only like this when people really, really fucking need it. It’s something Neal and El shared, the instinctive knowledge of how to take care of other people, what others needed, and they smiled and gently made fun of Peter because if there were four right things to say and one wrong thing, Peter always chose the wrong thing. But what neither of them understood was how to take care of themselves and how to actually have what they wanted, not like Peter, who silently watched over _them_.

They have two beds again, but this time Neal slides into Peter’s too-narrow bed, a familiar weight at his back and curls his body around Peter’s, shielding him from the world.

 

 

 

End part 1.


	2. (gladly beyond)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of rushed this because I'm going to be busy all week, starting tomorrow and I wanted to get this up. It was meant to be longer, but I think I said everything I meant to say.

It’s hot in Mississippi, even at dusk. Sweat prickles at his skin and makes his shirt cling uncomfortably.

Peter buys a six-pack of beer at a convenience store, pulls off the street into an empty field and sits on the hood of the car. Neal slides up beside him. It’s a testament to Neal’s grief that he doesn’t bitch about the shitty beer.

Peter tries to clear his head, but keeps getting distracted by the noise. He’d picked Mississippi for the vast open fields, for the promise of solitude and quiet, but the countryside is a loud place, if you know how to listen. A pack of coyotes howl from some far-off place, eerie and high.

The coyotes seem to say, The past has bled away, untouchable, unchangeable and imperfect. It’s forever out of your reach and you can only examine it detached from the turmoil in which the memories were created.

At his side, Neal stretches out, sighs, scratches his stomach loudly. Aimlessness doesn’t fit Neal well; his hands are always searching for things or people to touch. Peter has watched him caress a lime in the grocery store with the same careless reverence he grants all things - the crook of El’s neck, priceless works of art.

Peter looks off to into the distance - the stars shine so brightly out here - and unthinkingly slides his hands between Neal’s. He feels Neal go still beside him, and he wonders how long it’s been since they’ve touched in any real way.

He gives Neal’s hand a squeeze and he feels Neal’s hands wrap around his, damp and steady and sure. 

 

*

 

Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming pass by in a blur of green and brown, both flat and mountainous, grey-blue skies stretching above them as far into the horizon as Peter can see. He rolls down the window to feel the wind on his face. That it messes up Neal’s hair, too long and curling wildly around his nape, is just a bonus.

The arid warmth seeps into Peter’s bones, drying him out from the inside out. He naps until the sun’s too bright in the sky, making his face sting and turning the inside of his eyelids bright orange. 

Neal buys cheap plastic sunglasses from an honest-to-god tourist _saloon_ and Peter laughs - dry, unfamiliar gasps, but still _laughter_ \- at how they keep sliding down Neal’s nose as he drives.

 

*

 

They go to Forest Park in Oregon, walk the trails alongside young folks with inexplicable piercings and the elderly. Peter wears his new tennis shoes with red clay caked in the soles from Kentucky and dust from Idaho clinging to the sides. He doesn't have pictures, but he has this, the map of this trip over his skin and clothes, the map of his life on his body and face.

He looks so much older than he used to. 

Neal hums absently beside him, quiet and strangely sweet. The sound reverberates through Peter's body like muscle memory, and he remembers Neal humming in the shower and singing softly to himself while juicing oranges in the mornings. 

He looks over at Neal, head tilted up, considering the trees and blue sky, and thinks with an unfamiliar clarity, _I should not have let you go so easily._

 

*

 

They’re in California, amongst palm trees and overly crowded beaches. Neal looks at ease, but he looks at ease in almost any situation, and it’s nothing more than a carefully cultivated illusion. In white linen and out of his silk suits, he looks less like himself than Peter's used to, and Peter has only ever wanted honesty. He endures Neal’s fake smiles and easy manner, because he’s always been utterly in love with Neal’s complexities, his uncertainty, his _essential nature_ , and Peter’s never told him, maybe not even hinted at it.

Peter realizes with an unflattering revelation, that he’s kind of been a shit.

Peter needed this time to grieve for El, but Neal desperately needed it, too, and Peter had let himself forget that, which seems unbearably cruel now. They’re packing their bags, leaving sunny San Francisco for the bright lights of Los Angeles and Peter asks Neal what he’s thinking, because he should have asked months ago and never did.

Neal looks at him, carefully appraising. 

“I’m not El, I - I can’t replace her and I don’t want to. I _miss_ her, _god_ -” Neal says in a sudden jumble, the words tumbling over each other, incoherent and unsure. 

Peter has learned this about love: it will turn your world upside down and tear you apart at the seams. But he's never been afraid of his feelings, and the fear of losing something has never been enough to keep him from trying to have it.

Because he doesn't have the words, has never had the right words, Peter drops his bag, crosses the room and presses kisses over Neal’s face, over his eyelids, nose, the strong curve of his jaw, silent apologies and wordless promises. He watches Neal lean in to them with his eyes shut, like a flower opening towards the sun, over and over again. In this moment, there's only this, the smell of Neal's skin, the way his lips part and his soft panting breaths. Peter relearns it all, drags his fingers against Neal's bottom lip, across his eyelashes, spiky and damp, and imagines himself a cartographer in a strange new land.

Peter allows himself to remember and feel and love.

“I know you’re not,” Peter says, and feels it with absolute certainty down to his bones. “Let’s go the hell home.”

 

The end.


End file.
